Sarah and JVL discuss Trump’s recent poll numbers, which show Trump’s approval rating is falling fast, and how the economy might be Trump’s weakness now that he is in charge. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Sarah Longwell & the Team @ The Bulwark Source […]

George and Sarah talk about Donald Trump’s quoting of Napoleon and calling himself a king, the resignations in SDNY over Mayor Eric Adams corruption case, Elon Musk’s control with DOGE, and Trump’s tanking approval ratings. Leave a comment Watch, listen and leave a comment. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left side of the player to toggle to the audio edition. Follow George Conway Explains It All wherever you get your podcasts and YouTube. Ad-free editions are available exclusively for Bulwark+ members. […]

Kash Patel has been confirmed as FBI Director. With Patel at the helm, the purge begins. What does this mean for law enforcement, democracy, and Trump’s power? Tim Miller and Sam Stein break it down. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Add Bulwark+Live feed to your player […]

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock) LAST FRIDAY, AT THE MUNICH SECURITY CONFERENCE, Vice President JD Vance lectured our European allies about democracy. “When we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard,” he preached. “We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them.” Vance’s speech was remarkable not just because he misrepresented the European cases he cited—in particular, the recent election in Romania, […]

(Composite / Photos: Shutterstock / GettyImages) Republicans are trying to advance a budget resolution that would provide the framework to support the most critical parts of President Trump’s agenda—or, at least, the parts the president can’t unilaterally accomplish on his own. But no one seems to be on the same page about which option will best serve that goal. Senate Republicans moved forward with a plan devised by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) focused largely on immigration, while the House is advancing their own, all-encompassing approach. […]

Review of Travellers of the World Revolution: A Global History of the Communist International by Brigitte Studer (Verso Books, 2023) The Communist International was conceived in March 1919 amid the siege conditions of revolutionary Russia, within weeks of Berlin’s Spartacist Uprising and the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. The Comintern’s twenty-four years of activity before its dissolution in 1943 were a historic high point for the rationally organized and transnationally coordinated pursuit of the overthrow of capitalism. The Comintern was the third in […]

If Marco Rubio was NOT playing the long game masquerading as a patriotic neocon who gets placed in the State Department to then give Russia everything it wanted, what would he be doing differently? Meanwhile, a Democratic version of the Tea Party may be brewing, the tensions between Elon and Russ Vought are likely to pop out, and a psychoanalyst needs to explain Mitch McConnell. Plus, the Saudis are getting their claws in our sports with a LIV-PGA deal and Trump’s astonishingly corrupt involvement. And […]

Today we’re going to talk about Elon Musk’s black MAGA hat. I know what you’re thinking: With everything else going on you want to talk about a forking hat? But bear with me, because Musk’s black hat isn’t random. It’s an intentional choice made to crack up MAGA. Musk is attempting to build a splinter movement, complete with his own competing iconography. Musk’s black hat might be the future of MAGA, both seriously and literally. (Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock) Branding and iconography have […]

Silicon Valley is moving sharply and openly to the right. In a presidential inauguration where the best seats were essentially sold at auction, tech billionaires and CEOs from Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta paid premiums to sit close to Donald Trump. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk — once a darling of those hoping for a greener capitalism — even managed a fascist salute. What a stark change from the 2016 election. Then Facebook’s (now Meta) Mark Zuckerberg felt the need to publicly affirm that […]

One month in, the basic gambit of the second Trump administration seems to be that they think you’re stupid. Donald Trump’s team seems convinced they can ignore the long-standing problems that have made normal life insecure or impossible for average people in the United States — even that they can make those problem worse and create whole new ones — and that you won’t notice they’re doing it if they carry out the political equivalent of jangling keys in front of a baby. They think […]

Eliot and Eric discuss the Munich Security Conference including its background and history. They review the contradictory signals sent by the many Trump officials who have been in different parts of Europe in the run-up to and aftermath of the Munich conference. They discuss Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments, Vice President J.D. Vance’s lamentable, off-key speech to the conference, the predatory agreement for the US to colonize Ukraine’s raw materials that Secretary of the Treasury Bessent presented to Zelensky in Kyiv and the announcement […]

Daniel Bessner Yes, one can even imagine the North Atlantic world as a single polity, in the sense that it has — or imagines itself as having — a shared cultural heritage. These are, after all, the major colonial powers. They’ve been working against each other, but also to some degree against the Global South, for five hundred or so years. American foreign policy thinkers determined in the postwar era that the United States needed control and/or influence over major industrial bases around the world. […]

Here at The Bulwark, you might have noticed, we tend to take a pretty cynical view of the current occupant in the Oval Office. And yet, we confess that not even we had this one on our Week Four bingo cards: The president of the United States made an unprecedented declaration on Wednesday while applauding his administration’s decision to terminate federal approval of New York’s congestion pricing program. “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED,” Trump wrote on his social […]

This piece was first published in Flamman. The two heavily armed brothers were dressed like a masked tactical unit. They broke into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo at noon on January 7, 2015, and opened fire at the editorial staff meeting. As they fled, the Salafist brothers also shot at the police who arrived at the scene. Among the twelve dead were five cartoonists and two police officers. Ten years ago, we were “all Charlie.” And we didn’t hesitate to call […]

Michael Steele speaks with Tamika D. Mallory, social justice leader and movement strategist who led the historic 2017 Women’s March. The pair discuss how Tamika discovered her purpose in activism, what makes for successful organizing and what leading a movement looks like in this new era of Trump. Check out her book, “I Lived to Tell the Story: A Memoir of Love, Legacy, and Resilience” here: https://www.amazon.com/Lived-Tell-Story-Tamika-Mallory/dp/1982173491 Leave a comment Check out the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Timothy-Snyder/dp/0593728726 Watch, listen and leave a comment. Don’t care for […]

US President Donald Trump takes a question as he speaks during the signing of executive orders at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on February 18, 2025. Trump said he was “disappointed” to hear that Kyiv had complained about being cut out of talks between the United States and Russia in Saudi Arabia February 18 on ending the Ukraine war. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images) AS I WATCHED ELECTION RETURNS on the evening of November 5, 2024, I was struck by the […]

Overtime is for everyone. If you’re a subscriber: thank you. If you’re not, there’s no better time to subscribe to Bulwark+ than today. If you like today’s issue, you can share this newsletter with someone you think would value it. Elon Musk speaks with President Donald J. Trump and reporters in the Oval Office at the White House on February 11, 2025. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) THREE DAYS AFTER the National Institutes of Health abruptly announced it would place a […]

Tim Miller and Pablo Torre go over how the Saudis and LIV Golf are causing a scene in the sports world. How Trump is trying to come in and save the day, and how it’s all about the money. Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job […]

Sam Stein is joined by Chuck Todd to discuss the Trump administration indefinitely banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One over use of ‘Gulf of Mexico.’ Leave a comment As always: Watch, listen, and leave a comment. Bulwark+ Takes is home to short videos, livestreams and event archives exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Don’t care for video? Use the controls on the left-hand side of the player to toggle to audio. Great Job Sam Stein & the Team @ The Bulwark […]

In 1933, two young members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), Reginald “Shorty” Patullo and Noel Counihan, initiated one of the most successful working-class protests to take place in Australia during the Great Depression. The Battle of Phoenix Street — as it came to be known — began in Brunswick, a then working-class suburb in Melbourne. In defiance of anti-protest laws targeting the Left, Patullo scaled a moving tram and “shouted communistic slogans,” as Counihan locked himself inside a steel cage nearby. Enraged, Victoria […]

Crypto should be one of the biggest stories out of the Trump administration, but the crypto guys are really good at making it seem more complicated than it is. Bloomberg’s Zeke Faux joins Tim to run down the ins-and-outs, and the players—including the Chinese businessman facing SEC charges who swears the $56 million he gave Trump has absolutely nothing, zero, zilch to do with his case. Meanwhile, we’re about to find out how much Republicans really care about the deficit with the coming budget, and […]

Following the rise of right-wing populism throughout the 2010s and the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, center-left political parties sought to reinvent themselves under a new interventionist economic agenda. Often dubbed “supply-side progressivism,” this approach includes a stronger state role in directing economic development, investing in infrastructure, promoting a green transition, and improving living standards for communities left behind by globalization. This model was most clearly demonstrated by the Biden administration’s early legislative successes. Its COVID stimulus, infrastructure investments, and industrial policy measures seemingly flouted […]

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (at right) and Putin foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov (second to right) attend a meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on February 18, 2025 with Secretary of State Marco Rubio (second to left), Trump Nation Security Advisor Mike Waltz (third to left), and Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. (Photo by Russian Foreign Ministry / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images) WE FIND OURSELVES IN WHAT President Zelensky of Ukraine has recently called a “disinformation bubble” regarding the war in Ukraine, so perhaps […]

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages) I know that most people don’t care about foreign policy, but this is kind of important. Yesterday it became clear that America hasn’t abandoned its allies so much as switched sides. The Trump administration is trying to bully Canada, Denmark, and the NATO countries. It just held a summit with Russia even though we once provided a security assurance to Ukraine. It is not the case that America is retreating into splendid isolationism. No, we are still taking sides in world […]